2004-09-16

Book Links

Do you know how many books are there on the Internet? There are numerous movements for scanning and OCRing books around the world (besides older initiatives like the Project Gutenberg and sites like BlackMask). So I estimate that currently, there are in excess of 100,000-500,000 books on the Internet. (Of course, this is a wide range, but I can't be any more exact.) Also, please note that I mean publicly available books (though not all legal), since there may be thousands of books in the publishers' sites that are not available to the public.

Recently, I have spent a lot of time in extracting book links from the Internet. As an example, the links for the book "Flatland" by Edwin A Abbott are given below (not all the links may be active now):

Note: I am not sure if downloading these links is legal. Giving these links is for informational purposes only.

Now, I thought of an interesting thing to do. I have a collection of ca. 40,000 book links. I counted the number of occurrences for each author among them. This is a partial result of this statistics (some books, like Star Trek series, with indeterminate authors have been omitted):

Author stats

Author

Count

King, Stephen

553

Asimov, Isaac

524

Lovecraft, HP

379

Heinlein, Robert A

349

Lem, Stanislaw

334

Grant, Maxwell

292

Simak, Clifford D

284

Clarke, Arthur C

239

Harrison, Harry

231

Bradbury, Ray

224

Sheckley, Robert

221

Balzac, Honoré de

208

McCaffrey, Anne

193

Niven, Larry

185

Andersen, Hans Chiristian

182

Fitzgerald, F Scott

180

Grimm, Hermanos

178

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

163

Zelazny, Roger

158

Pohl, Frederik

145

Asprin, Robert Lynn

138

Silverberg, Robert

136

Anderson, Poul

133

Borges, Jorge Luis

133

Dick, Philip K

132

Foster, Alan Dean

132

Burroughs, Edgar Rice

127

Norton, André

119

Le Guin, Ursula Kroeber

115

Card, Orson Scott

111

Twain, Mark

108

Dickens, Charles

106

Ellison, Harlan

103

Shakespeare, William

103

Dumas, Alexandre

102

Farmer, Philip José

101

Christie, Agatha

99

I wonder if this list also reflects the global trend of reading authors, or if it is affected by other factors, as well. Of course, in collections like the Project Gutenberg, only books with expired copyright span are published. But sporadic scanners do not obey laws as rigidly, so that the newest books of famous authors are published on the Web after only a few days of their publication (e.g., "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" by JK Rowling was published on the Internet just a few days after its official release date).